For many languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, text can be phonetically entered with one symbolic system and converted for display in a second symbolic system. For example, Pinyin is a phonetic system for transcribing Mandarin Chinese using the Roman alphabet. In a Pinyin transliteration, the phonetic pronunciations of Chinese characters can be mapped to syllables composed of Roman letters. Pinyin is commonly used to input Chinese text into a computer via a conversion engine. For a given Pinyin input, the conversion engine outputs one or more likely candidate Chinese words or phrases corresponding to the Pinyin input. However, entering Chinese text using Pinyin can be slow and inefficient. In particular, the user needs to input the corresponding Pinyin text for each desired word and then select the desired corresponding candidate Chinese words or phrases presented by the conversion engine. Frequently, the desired candidate Chinese word or phrase is not the first candidate presented by the conversion engine and thus the user needs to provide additional input and expend additional time to obtain the desired candidate Chinese word(s). This can cause frustration and negatively impact user experience.